IDNs are the Internet's real star at the moment. But why do they matter? And why is ICANN putting so much effort into them? We asked Tina Dam, Director of ICANN's IDN program, to enlighten us.
As ICANN's IDN program Director, Tina Dam is pushing for the earliest possible launch of fully localised domain names
After spending time in the private sector and working for a domain name registrar, Tina Dam came to ICANN in 2003 as Chief gTLD Registry Liaison. In January 2006, she was appointed Director of the IDN program.
That ICANN would want to set up an IDN program in itself shows how big an issue IDNs have become over that past few years. But for most people, IDNs remain pretty obscure.
Domain names using non-English scripts have been around for a few years now, but ICANN is actually working on the next generation of IDNs: domains that are fully localised, including their extension.
So what's so important about these new IDNs anyway?
You have been in charge of overseeing IDN deployment since early 2006. Just to help us understand more about what that job entails can you tell us what changes you've seen with IDNs over the past 2 years? The main reason for my job change back in January 2006 was to launch a program that was 100% focused on the continued development and implementation of IDNs within ICANN. This program was formalised in August 2006 when ICANN hired new staff to fill my original role within ICANN.
We immediately started on activities that all were, and still are, focused on the introduction of IDN TLDs. So while IDNs have been available for registration under existing TLDs since early 2000, the plan is to make IDNs available at the TLD level as well – this will enable users to make registrations of, for example, domain names where all labels are in Arabic characters.
Initially such activities included analysis and laboratory testing, which resulted in the insertion of 11 IDN TLDs for test purposes live in the root in October this year. That certainly is the highlight of IDN changes in past years. Behind this result were numerous actions including revisions of IDN implementation guidelines, changes of IANA procedures for how to insert and manage TLDs in the root zone, development of emergency procedures in case of technical security issues, and many more.
With the IDN TLDs for testing purposes a wiki was launched where anyone interested can go and test applications such as browsers and mail clients capability of handling IDNs. Meanwhile additional technical tests are ongoing as well.
Why is this test program so significant? Said shortly, we simply need to figure out if things are stable enough for actual production deployment (i.e. where users can make registrations of fully localised domains). Meanwhile the wiki that the tests are centered around serve as a test environment for application developers, and for any potential IDN TLD registry applicants so that they can see what kind of issues their customers will be facing in the future. The fact is that not all issues will be solved before IDN TLDs go live, but in this way we have a demonstration platform that provides a good understanding of what these issues are.
How long is the current IDN test scheduled to go on for? Essentially we will keep the 11 IDN TLDs in the root for as long as the corresponding community finds it useful. There could for example be a 6 month overlap period between the launch of an Arabic production IDN TLD and the closedown of the Arabic IDN test TLD.
What happens after that? Users will be able to make registrations and use domain names solely based on their own choice of characters or native language. Naturally this requires that someone be interested in applying for and running such IDN TLDs…
Why does ICANN need to test IDNs anyway? IDNs are already available in many country codes and .COM and .NET aren't they? Yes, but there is a big difference between inserting something in the zone file for a TLD and inserting something in the root zone of the Internet. We basically need to find the bugs and get these solved – as opposed to risking breaking the Internet. We do this based on the experience from the implementation in various country codes and those gTLDs that have implemented IDNs as well.
Why are IDNs so important to ICANN? Surely they pose a technical risk to a unified Internet naming system (as can be seen by the level of caution being exercised and the amount of testing being done)? And you don't need localised domain names to access localised web content do you? They are important because they will enable Internet users across the world to access the Internet using characters from their native languages. While this is not required for localised content I would counter-raise the question to you. Imagine that you have to access a website with French content, but by means of a domain name with Chinese characters. That really does not work well for you (unless you know how to type Chinese, and for that matter can see the difference between the Chinese characters and hence remember a domain name, or an address if you see one or are told about one). But this is how accessing the Internet is experienced today by many users. The technical risks we have to test and analyze and set up frameworks that will eliminate them as much as possible. The alternative is either to continue the way things works today, which I hope I just demonstrated to be unfair, or to have numerous alternate roots, also known as 'other Internets', which destroy the global interoperability and hence global communication functionality of the Internet as we know it today.
When can people expect to see full IDNs being launched? That is a good question but unfortunately I don’t have a specific date for you. The technical and the policy work are aiming at being finalized in mid/end 2008. At this time applicants will need to submit their information, go through evaluations and eventually launch and make registrations available. Some guesses on which this may happen are early 2009, however it is not possible for me to say until I know more about the external dependencies. However, I would like to see it happening as soon as possible.
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